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“The Garfield Effect”

The process of attaining enlightenment is already complicated enough without throwing cats into the mix (please don’t throw your cat). People all across the globe remove themselves from society, secreting themselves away in monasteries in an attempt to achieve the almost impossible dream of enlightenment. Most of those people are not cat owners and for good reason. Cats, as lovable and cuddly as they can be, are clearly out to keep everyone in the cycle of Saṃsāra: rebirth and suffering for eternity.

I call this “The Garfield Effect” where man and cat are forever trapped in suffering and possibly eating lasagna.

This comic is actually more about my brother than it is about me, he has long made his allegiance to the canine species known to both his family and our cat. There’s something about felines that just strikes a very strange and angry chord with him, perhaps it is the poop or perhaps it is something deeper. Science may never have the answers.

Buddhism’s thoughts on reincarnation, rebirth, and the cycle of suffering known as Saṃsāra have their roots in Hinduism, not unlike Christianity’s roots to Judaism. The idea that all life possesses spirit and that this spirit is reborn after each death is not unknown to us here the West, but it is often understood incorrectly. Many people have a positive view of reincarnation, seeing it as a good thing, a continuance of the existence they know and love, a way of escaping death not unlike the Christian afterlife. To Buddhism, this could not be further from the case. To achieve Nirvana, (the spiritual state, not the band, you can acquire that at your local music store) is to remove oneself from this cycle of rebirth, to realize that the cycle is not a gift, but a curse of sorts that keeps us tied to a wheel of suffering for eternity. Life, in this view, is a kind of Hell unto itself.

It’s hard to imagine for those of us that grew up with the Christian concept of everlasting life, that this could be the case. You hear people talk about reincarnation sometimes and there’s typically a positive note in the voices of those discussing it. There’s also a lot of people talking about karma as if it were this immediate thing, that by doing good deeds, one is rewarded instantaneously for their actions, but the religions from which the concept stems see it very differently. Karma is not simply the acquisition of reward for good deeds but rather the power of cause and effect from the actions in one’s current as well as past lives. Karma is not fate, it is far more complicated than this one blog post can really convey, unfortunately, especially given its role in different sects and religions.

There are different views on just how the process of reincarnation works, especially with regard to animals, as they largely act on instinct. There are those that say that instinctual animals can only go forward, up the hierarchy of creatures through each death and rebirth, from bacteria to snail to fish to mammal or whatever. There is also a school of thought that says all creatures possess some ability for choice and that, because of this, they may be reduced in the next life.

Either way, cats are probably screwed. Either they’re pooping on floors or scratching at the door at 3am for food, causing rage and holding their owners back from achieving enlightenment, or they’re holding themselves back by mooching off of people and torturing other animals before they eat them.

Things don’t look great for the little guys.

I guess at the very least, we will always have each other. Human and feline, eternal companions in Saṃsāra and lasagna.

Just like Garfield.

(this blog post is just a fraction (and a simplification at that) of what Buddhist and Hindu thought have to say on Saṃsāra and reincarnation and doesn’t really get into it very well and for that, I apologize.)

I also wanted to make it clear that I actually really love my cat, as weird as she is.

haha I know, she’s actually doing it because there’s another cat that has moved into the neighborhood, they fight all the time. When she gets to go outside she just poops out there and doesn’t bury it but sometimes she’s just gotta go inside. Unfortunately, I don’t think leaving her stuff unburied indoors is really doing much to that other cat. It did, however, piss my brother off pretty badly.

To add… I’m wondering the relationship that actually exists between Buddha and cats… Couple of years ago when visiting this temple in Thailand, there were cats ALL OVER THE STATUE. No one shooed them away. There were just… all over the statue. :|a

I relate to this. We had an entire batch of cats that got banished from the house because they didn’t get along with one another and kept going outside of the litterbox. My cat (named Mo) was one of the worst offenders, because the other two (including Mo’s brother, Mike – yes we give our cats weird names) might have just been idiots, but she was definitely doing it out of spite and bitterness. Maybe they did it because they didn’t like my mom and they knew it bothered her more than anybody… heh heh.

All I ever wanted in my life is to be a cat. If you’re telling me my cat will somehow make it so that I can be reborn as a cat in the next life, I will love my cat forever. Sleeping all day, eating whenever I like, play, roam around the streets. Who wouldn’t want to be a cat?

My cats are terribly evil about this. When they are angry with me or my roomie, they urinate on HER clothing 😀 I am spared, luckily, but it still happens. They are a spiteful pair.

Example: I am sitting home with a severe virus and 103 fever today and they INSIST on playing around and clawing my thighs.

Example: My alarm goes off in the morning, I take more that 2 minutes to get up and the female is sitting above my head, meowing. She then proceeds to slap me in the face and run off to perch on top of the sink.

Evil critters. I cannot wait to be reincarnated to drive them up a wall *plots*

My cat dosen’t have a name. She should be Poppy but we called her cat too long and it stuck. I think I’m her favorite human. She sleeps on me every night until 2or 4 in the morning. She just came in the room. Now she’s sitting on the top of the sofa…

My cats have decided that if their bowl isn’t COMPLETELY full of food they must be dying of starvation. It’s both cute (because they become REALLY affectionate) and annoying. Mostly depending on my mood.

Also, one of my cats likes to bite my nose if I’m in bed and he’s peckish. And he has sharp teeth. Batting at him has no effect. The only thing to do is hide your nose in your pillow or hands.

I just got the image of cat reincarnation as being trapped in some sort of adorably cruel infinite loop like a computer. If you make the program crash in some way the computer gets stuck in doing the same thing over and over until you unplug the thing. Make some kind of booboo in your last life that results in you coming back as a cat and you will forever stay a cat.

Darling, a gentle reminder that cats are pristinely clean by nature. Notice how at every juncture in a cat’s day, they stop to clean themselves? I’ve had a cat with litter problems, and the bottom line is you need to keep that litter box clean, clean, clean. I do the scoop thing almost daily. Depending on the cat, you could probably replace every X days, but please give your every attention here. My soon-to-be daughter in law who works for a local humane society gives he comparison of YOU not wanting to use a filthy public rest room. My newest baby, Starbuck, has never had a potty issue. Now there can also be passive-aggressive issues, but start by ruling out the litter box as the issue. Love to my fellow cat lovers.

What your cat is doing is called middening. It happens when the cat feel threatened or stressed.It can be solved by placing the cat in an area that it can define as it’s own. By the vet’s recommendation, we confined the cat in the closet for a week. Before the human society gets on my back for this, we took food and water to it every day, and spent a lot of time comforting it, we just didn’t let it out of the closet. The closet became her home and since she had her litterbox, food, and water in there, and we went in there with her for the time she was in there, she acclimated to it. After we let her back into the rest of the house, she would run into it whenever she was frightened. This basically means you give up the closet to the cat, but she stopped pooping outside her litter box.
Cats start middening when they feel unsafe or unsure of themselves. Our cat was threatened by a new cat, and was feeling insecure. Middening is not a passive aggressive action, it’s a reaction to fear and insecurity.
Otherwise, your cat might just not like the smell of the litter box if you don’t clean it every day.

Ooh, that’s a good one… but it is like the chicken and the egg, I think; a question with no answer, That being said, I would put my money on the woman talking about her “spiritual enlightenment problem”. Why? No reason, it’s just funnier that way. Complaining about something she had coming and never being able to understand why. [Chuckles]

Great comic by the way, I have read it start to finish (in less than a week!) and I’m looking forward to seeing more.